I thought this was most ill-considered: "But the only reason to have any hope for social transformation is that "we are many, they are few." I don't care to defend Angela Davis, but I do understand what she was getting at. Angela Davis spoke twice in Philly the other night, at the Marcuse conference and then at Occupy Philly. In the former she talked more expansively about Attica -- that the Attica prisoners attempted to institute communal relations in which everyone's needs were met during their occupation, not unlike the prefigurative politics OWS is experimenting with. I think she started talking about this after someone in the audience asked her to talk about George Jackson. More than this, what she said at Zuccotti and at Occupy Philly speak to a hesitation a lot of folks I know have expressed about OWS: if it's just about a fantasy of the "99%" whose economic oppression trumps any other kind of institutionalized differentiation (racialized, sexual/gendered, etc), then we don't want to touch it. We'd rather support the Pelican Bay hunger strikes, the work people are already engaged in. But that way people really lose out on a lot of super experienced organizing muscle.
To put it another way: if, as someone else wrote yesterday, "we" can't survive the winter without the support of the "working class" communities in NYC -- immigrant and black communities, someone else added, revealing that "we" as disgustingly racialized -- it might be quite important to be talking about prisons. Statistically, the prison population is also pretty skewed and much higher in certain states like California, right? I think everyone I know in CA knows someone who's been in prison. It's no coincidence that the General Strike is happening in Oakland, with a long history of black and non-white insurrection and a more recent history of rioting against the racist viciousness of the police. Nor that it originates in a plaza renamed after Oscar Grant.
"Why an emphasis on people with no social power?"
Uh yeah, because it's only the people with social power who should be out in the streets? Good luck with that. I love to see some white middle-class men rioting, I do.
Cheers, Aren Aizura
> There are many things I admire about Angela Davis, and I have warm memories of being on a panel with her at Rethinking Marxism 2000. She was wise and very gracious. But she reportedly told the OWS gathering at Zuccotti tonight to: 1) identify with Troy Davis, and 2) study the Attica prisoners for pointers on how to become a "dangerous class." I have two problems with this: 1) Troy Davis is dead. His execution was a crime, but as anything but a moral force, he's dead. And 2) the Attica prisoners were utterly crushed. Many of them are either dead or still behind bars.
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> The American carceral state is an appalling horror, a grotesque form of social control. But most people are not in prison. There are about 70 times as many employed members of the working class as there are prisoners in the U.S. Even among African Americans, there are about 30 times as many employed as there are behind bars. There are about 6 times as many black unemployed as there are prisoners. Yet if you judged by a lot of left discourse, the modal black American is a prisoner.
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> Why such an emphasis on people with no social power? The working class produces everything of value, and could shut it all down tomorrow if it wanted to. I'd be the first to say that too much behavior is criminalized, there are way too many people behind bars, and our prisons are miserable places. But the only reason to have any hope for social transformation is that "we are many, they are few." In strictly numerical terms, there are about as many prisoners as there are members of the bourgeoisie. Revolutions are not made by the most marginalized members of a society.
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